Next Victim

by Michael Prescott

  Hart and DiFranco barely noted her arrival. To them, she was the outsider, the intruder on their turf, and they didn’t seem as convinced as Larkin that her skills at office politics were no threat to their own careers.

  The two men kept their gazes fixed on the monitors. An array of cameras with miniature lenses, concealed in the walls and ceiling of the interrogation room, provided comprehensive surveillance without being as obvious as the traditional two-way mirror. The entire interrogation was being digitally videotaped and audiotaped.

  "You must’ve been pretty pissed," Michaelson said. "To come all this way for a new job and have it disappear after four months."

  "I thought about going back to Colorado. But I was able to find work here."

  "So I guess you’ve learned to like LA?"

  "I told you, it’s okay."

  "This time of year, you can’t beat it. Easter weekend and it’s eighty degrees."

  "Nice weather."

  "And that breeze off the ocean—man, we even get it here, and we’re four miles inland."

  "It’s terrific. I thought you were with the FBI."

  "I am, Bill. I showed you my ID. We both did."

  "I know that. But I was starting to wonder."

  "Were you?"

  "Yeah. I thought you might be with the chamber of commerce, what with all this crap about the weather."

  DiFranco stifled a laugh. William Hayde wasn’t buying Michaelson’s just-getting-to-know-you routine. And it looked like he hadn’t Stockholmed, either.

  Tess allowed herself to study the image in the nearest monitor.

  The interrogation room looked as it always did, a drab, spartan chamber with no clock on the wall and no windows. A steel table, gunmetal gray. Four straight-backed steel chairs, deliberately uncomfortable.

  Two of the chairs were occupied by Michaelson and Gaines, a third by William Hayde. Gaines was seated next to the suspect, while Michaelson sat on the diagonal. This was standard procedure. Never sit directly across the table from the person you’re interrogating. You need to be able to lean close and invade his space, then back off if he starts to confess. Like the room itself, the techniques of interrogation were designed to put the suspect at the greatest possible psychological disadvantage.

  Michaelson wore a dark gray suit and a blue tie, and he was leaning forward, his hand on the table near a tape recorder that was ostentatiously recording the interview. The tape recorder was for show. The real recording was done by the audio equipment in the surveillance room.

  "You’re right, Bill," Michaelson said. "We’re not here to talk about the weather. We’ve got a little problem, you see."

  "Looks like you think I’m the one with the problem," Hayde answered, unperturbed.

  Tess stared at his face on the screen. A smug, unlined face. Thin lips, sharp cheekbones, eyes that squinted without humor. He was clean-shaven, his cheeks ragged with a hint of stubble. His hair was cut short, blondish on top, darker at the sides. He had no obvious scars, moles, or birthmarks. There was nothing distinctive about him at all.

  Was it Mobius’s face? Could he be this ordinary, this forgettable?

  There was no way to know. Dozens of people had seen Mobius in Denver, and a few had seen him in LA, but no two of them ever seemed to see the same man.

  All that could be said about Mobius was that he was Caucasian and at least five-foot-ten, with a lean but wiry build. All the bartenders and witnesses agreed on these details. That he was white was no surprise; for some reason, nearly all ritualistic sex murders were committed by white men. That he was physically strong was no surprise, either—it would take a strong man to hold down a struggling woman while duct-taping her to a bed.

  Nothing else was known about him. Sometimes his hair was brown, sometimes blond, sometimes thick and long, sometimes thin and close-cropped. He wore glasses occasionally but most often did not. Beards and mustaches came and went on his face, changing as frequently as his style of dress—casual one night, stylish the next.

  People remembered him as anywhere from thirty to fifty. He was a young professional or a middle-aged working man. He reminded some people of a plumber or electrician, while others had him pegged as a college professor or business executive.

  He had never used valet parking, and no one had ever seen his car. He wore a condom and left no semen for the forensic analysts to find. And he was careful to present them with no other clues—no fingerprints, no telltale fibers. He routinely cleaned and disinfected every surface at the crime scene before departing.

  He was cunning and obsessed, and he gave his enemies nothing to work with.

  After the second killing, the Denver media had nicknamed him the Pickup Artist. Although the case had been widely publicized, there had been no decline in the number of people frequenting singles’ bars. Evidently the element of danger injected into the dating milieu had served as a turn-on. No one in LA was paying attention, either—but the media had not yet connected Angie Callahan’s death with the Denver story from two years ago.

  Eventually the details would come out, but most likely curiosity and a pleasurable thrill of passing interest would be the only public reaction. Tess ought to have been happy about that. It made her job easier. But she couldn’t help wondering if passive acceptance of a phenomenon like Mobius was not, in the long run, a greater threat than Mobius himself.

  She noticed that the computer operator was sneaking glances at her. She returned his stare, and he smiled, embarrassed. "You’re Tess McCallum, right? The Black Tiger case."

  Black Tiger again. People always wanted to talk about that.

  "Yes," she said with a shrug.

  "We, uh, we studied it at the academy."

  This made her feel old. "Thanks."

  "That was some amazing work you did."

  "It was a long time ago."

  "Not so long. Seven, eight years, right?"

  She turned away, ending the conversation. "Seems longer."

  Seems like a lifetime, she thought.

  "Well," Michaelson was saying, "why don’t we see if you can help us with our problem, Bill. I want to talk about what happened tonight."

  "Nothing happened tonight," Hayde said.

  "Nothing?"

  "Nothing important. Hell, I thought LA was supposed to be laid-back. Live and let live, isn’t that the local philosophy?"

  He seemed calm. Tess wasn’t certain if this was a good or bad sign. Most innocent people, accused of a crime, would protest noisily. But there were exceptions—people so sure of their innocence that they figured it was all a misunderstanding, easily worked out. Or people who simply didn’t allow themselves to be flustered, people who needed to be in control.

  Of course, a sociopath wouldn’t be flustered either.

  Tess wondered which kind of man William Hayde was.

  "It’s the land of casual sex and sunny hedonism," Hayde said. "At least, that’s the subliminal message in all the brochures, not to mention every TV show of the last thirty years. So where did I go wrong, Officer?"

  "I’m not a police officer," Michaelson said. "I’m a special agent of the FBI."

  "Like Mulder and Scully, right?"

  "I don’t watch cop shows. I take it you do."

  "That’s a mark of criminal tendencies, isn’t it? Exhibiting an unhealthy interest in fictional presentations of law enforcement? Part of the profile, maybe?"

  "How do you know about profiles?"

  "TV. Everything I know, I learned from TV. It’s our great national educator."

  Tess frowned. His coyness was maddening. He behaved like a guest at a cocktail party, not a suspect under interrogation.

  Mobius might be this smooth, this unflappable. But would he be reckless enough to show it?

  She looked at his hands—large hands, the prominent knuckles tufted with pale hairs.

  A killer’s hands?

  One of those hands was manacled to a leg of the table. The other was free to gesticulate. Hayde was doing
a lot of gesturing, but his hand movements were lazy, almost insolent. He wore flashy cuff links, black pearls set in silver borders. The cuff link on his free hand flashed, catching the light. It seemed to be winking at her.

  "Anyway," Hayde said, "whenever I watch a cop show, I root for the good guys. I’m a big fan of the boys in blue—and that includes blue suits, you’ll be happy to hear." This with a nod at Gaines, who wore a suit of that color. "Now, are you going to tell me what this is all about, or am I going to have to invoke my right to an attorney and get all legalistic and tight-assed?"

  He was smiling as he said it. Tess knew he was smart. Of course she would expect an engineer to be of above-average intelligence. His vocabulary only confirmed that presumption—words like legalistic, hedonism, subliminal. Two-dollar words, as her father would say.

  Mobius was intelligent also. They had known that from the beginning. He would have to be intelligent, even charming, to be successful in the bar pickup scene. Anyway, serial killers classified as the organized type—methodical, obsessive, cunning—were often of above-average IQ.

  "Let’s talk about what went on with Agent Tyler at the apartment," Michaelson said.

  "Hey, hold it. That’s the end of the story. You have to start at the club."

  "Where you picked her up."

  "If you ask me, she’s the one who picked me up."

  "Does that happen to you often? Women pick you up?"

  "No, I’m a virgin, Officer. Sorry, I mean, Special Agent. I’ve never been with a girl before. Is it true they don’t have a wee-wee like boys do?"

  "I’m just asking—"

  "If I think I’m a stud? Not really. But in this town, on a Friday night, action isn’t hard to come by. Lots of times it’ll come looking for you. How about you, Officer Friendly? I’ll bet that genuine FBI badge gets you a piece of tail now and then, doesn’t it?"

  "We’re not talking about me, Bill."

  "Gosh, I’m Bill now. That’s real nice, how we’re such good pals all of a sudden. What was your name again?"

  "Richard."

  "Dick. Okay, Dick. What else did you want to know about picking up babes, Dick?"

  Tess glanced at another monitor, covering Michaelson and Gaines, and saw irritation flicker across Michaelson’s face. She knew he hated being called Dick. She also knew he would have no luck getting William Hayde to open up to him.

  DiFranco reached the same conclusion. "This creep isn’t gonna fall for the good-buddy act, no matter how they play it."

  "You’re right," Tess said. "He’s too smart."

  "Smart like our guy, you think?"

  She glanced at DiFranco and noticed that the others were watching her as well. "I want it to be him," she said carefully. "But…he’s sarcastic. Childish, in a way."

  "So?"

  "Mobius is a lot of things, but childish isn’t one of them."

  "I don’t know. There are those postcards."

  "He has a sense of humor. But not like this." She heard the inadequacy of her own explanation and tried to elaborate. "I can’t define it precisely—but I have a sense of what he’s like. Of his manner, his…mien."

  "Mien?" DiFranco sounded dubious, or maybe he was just unfamiliar with the word.

  "What it’s like to be around him when he’s just being himself."

  "Not a good place to be. Around him, I mean."

  "No," she said. "Not if you want to live."

  There was no more discussion. Tess knew they were all thinking of Angie Callahan.

  Angie Callahan had been a systems analyst for a defense contractor in Marina del Rey. She drove a Porsche, she had 150 channels on her satellite TV system, and she’d recently broken up with a marketing executive based in San Francisco who flew down to LA every Tuesday and Friday on a corporate jet.

  Eleven days ago, Angie had gone to a bar on Melrose Avenue populated by an upscale thirtysomething crowd. It was a meat rack, but an exceptionally high-class meat rack. According to the eyewitness accounts of the bartender and several bar patrons, the man she’d left with had been well built, with thick brown hair and strong features behind his mustache and beard. No one had heard him say his name, and he paid in cash, leaving a tip that was neither large nor small enough to cause comment.

  When Angie failed to arrive at work the next morning, her colleagues tried to reach her. Phone calls to her condo went unanswered. Messages to her pager were not returned. By late afternoon, her friends had prevailed on the president of the condo association to unlock Angie’s door.

  They found Angie in the bedroom, her wrists duct-taped to the headboard of her bed, her throat cut.

  It was a police investigation for a few hours, until Robbery-Homicide’s nationwide database search for crimes with a similar MO turned up the Denver case code-named RAVENKIL—in reference to a bar called Raven’s Roost, where the first victim had been acquired. Then the police brought in the FBI.

  Tess learned about the killing at ten o’clock, as she was turning down the bedcovers and debating which of three books to read. The phone rang, and it was Assistant Director Gerald Andrus in LA. Except for the obligatory Christmas cards, he hadn’t been in touch with her since he was transferred out of Denver a year and a half earlier.

  "It’s starting again," Andrus said without preamble.

  For a moment she hadn’t trusted herself to speak. Then she’d asked Andrus why he was calling her.

  "I’ve arranged for a loan-out. You’re coming to LA to be part of the task force."

  "You’ve cleared it with Cooper?" SAC Cooper was Andrus’s replacement at the Denver field office.

  "I’ve cleared it with the people who will clear it with Cooper. I have friends in high places, Tess."

  Of course he did. He might very well have called the director himself.

  "It’s a violation of policy," she said for no reason except that her mind had lost the ability to focus on anything that mattered. "I mean, I have a personal connection with the case."

  "I’m well aware of that. I want you here anyway. Be on a plane tomorrow."

  "I can leave tonight."

  "No, get your rest. You’ll need it."

  But she’d gotten no rest that night, and in the ten days since, she’d slept only when her body gave out from sheer exhaustion. Even then there was no rest. There were dreams. Dreams of the night of February 12, the bedroom door—and what lay beyond it.

  She wondered, at times, what kept her going. Was it simple inertia, the inability of a body in motion to cease its forward progress even when there was nowhere to go? Or was it revenge—and if so, was that an honorable motive for someone sworn to uphold impartial justice?

  Tess knew she could never be impartial in this case. She could not seek justice in its sterile, socially acceptable incarnation. Justice was the blindfolded lady with the balanced scales. She could never be that lady again. She had lost all sense of balance, and no blindfold could shut out the things she saw with her eyes closed.

  Whatever drove her, she had used it as fuel to stay awake and alert and on the move, twenty hours a day, as the task force was assembled and deployed.

  All the obvious avenues of investigation had been followed. Angie Callahan’s coworkers had been questioned. The bar had been staked out on the chance that the killer would return. Undercover ops were carried out in a variety of bars and nightclubs on Melrose Avenue. Linda Tyler had been the bait at one nightspot tonight. Tess, with agents Collins and Diaz, had been backing up another female agent working undercover at a different bar. So far none of the operations had yielded results—unless Hayde was their man.

  Physical evidence retrieved from the victim’s body had established that Mobius had engaged in antemortem intercourse—probably consensual, as there was no sign of rape. The murder weapon had been taken, and since none of Angie’s cutlery was missing, it was believed to be a pocketknife carried by the killer. The width of the wound channel matched the cuts inflicted on the Denver victims, suggesting that Mobius was
using the same knife he’d employed before.

  The wound itself, like the earlier ones, said a great deal about Mobius’s mind-set. He had slit Angie Callahan’s throat with care, avoiding the carotid arteries, so that the blood trickled out, bringing on death by slow degrees.

  And what had Mobius done during that long interval when Angie had felt her life bleeding away? Had he spoken to her or kissed her, or had he simply watched?

  Tess turned back to face the monitors. Michaelson was asking about William Hayde’s movements throughout the evening, and Hayde was answering in his bored, contemptuous voice, his free hand tracing slow circles in the air, the pearl-and-silver cuff link still winking as if it knew a secret it would not share.

  Tess wanted him to be Mobius. She wanted it so much.

  Please, God, she thought. Please let this man be a monster.

  Was that so much to ask?

  7

  "Do we tell the AD?" Jarvis asked.

  "Not yet."

  "I thought he wanted to be informed—"

  "We’ll inform Andrus later. Right now we’ve got higher priorities."

  Nobody contradicted him, which was just as well. Jack Tennant wasn’t used to being contradicted.

  Tennant was sixty years old, three years past the bureau’s ostensibly mandatory retirement age. He was tall and thick-muscled and bull-necked, and with his buzz-cut gray hair he looked like an aging drill instructor. In point of fact, he had been a drill instructor in the Marines during the Vietnam War, preparing the troops on Parris Island, and he still knew how to fire off an order in his gruff bulldog bark.

  Restlessly he paced an office in the FBI’s resident agency at LA International Airport. Seven faces were arrayed before him—two agents he’d brought with him from DC, and five more who were among the twenty supplied by the field office in Portland, most of whom were out canvassing all hotels within a two-mile radius of LAX.